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Have you ever wondered exactly which butterflies, birds, or reptiles live in your region?

The list of species found in a region or taxon group is called a checklist. GBIF calls a published checklist a dataset.

A checklist doesn't create itself. A group of experts comes together and collects every species ever recorded in the region: combing through open-source datasets, literature, historical records, and present-day records, and running field surveys to confirm what's still there. From that work, they build a curated list of species found in the region and publish it to a global repository.

Start with What is Checklist Hub? or jump straight into a section below.

GBIF hosts more than one kind of dataset, including checklists and occurrence datasets. An occurrence dataset is a collection of individual sightings pulled from open sources, and on its own it isn't enough to say a species belongs on a region's list. Occurrence records can carry errors: a misidentified species, an incorrect taxonomic classification, wrong coordinates, or a simple data-entry mistake. Confirming that a species is actually present takes expert review of the evidence behind each occurrence, not just the occurrence itself.

Most published checklists come out of biodiversity hotspots, regions with enough attention and funding to support that kind of sustained work. Plenty of other regions carry similar biodiversity but have never had a checklist built for them, so what lives there stays undocumented. Citizen science platforms are now generating records from many of these regions, often faster than anyone is turning them into a checklist. Checklist Hub is built to close that gap, making it easier to take those records and turn them into a published checklist for a region that has not had one before.

Building a checklist has traditionally been tedious. You gather occurrence records from GBIF, sightings from iNaturalist and eBird, and mentions in literature, and pull them into one place by hand. You check each name against a taxonomic authority and resolve synonyms one at a time. Once you have a draft list, you share it with collaborators for review, usually back and forth over email or spreadsheets, with no single record of who approved what. And at the end, you still have to convert the list into a Darwin Core Archive, the format GBIF requires, attach the right metadata, and publish it to GBIF.

Checklist Hub is built to take on each of those steps:

• Every name you import is checked against the GBIF Backbone and Catalogue of Life, with synonyms resolved automatically.
• Evidence for each species is gathered in one place, from GBIF, iNaturalist, eBird, and literature, instead of across separate tabs you'd otherwise cross-reference by hand.
• Reviewers work on the same list together. Nothing reaches the checklist without at least one qualified reviewer signing off, and every decision is logged with who made it and when.
• Reconciliation checks your checklist against other published checklists for the same region or taxon, so conflicts surface before publication.
• When you're ready to publish, Checklist Hub generates a compliant Darwin Core Archive, with metadata included, and walks you through submitting it to a GBIF-registered IPT.